


The Good Doctor

by koalaboy



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman - Fandom, Batman: Arkham (Video Games), Batman: Arkham - All Media Types, Batman: The Animated Series
Genre: Gen, Kinda, M/M, Multi, Other, Scriddler, in the future
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-25 08:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14374719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koalaboy/pseuds/koalaboy
Summary: There are two types of people who apply to work at Arkham Asylum - those who genuinely want to help people, and those who enjoy witnessing human torment. Which are you, Doctor Crane?Jonathan's Crane's first week at Arkham.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> kind of set in the codot!verse which can be found here waiting4codot.tumblr.com , but you don't have to know anything about that verse to read the fic.

Harley taps her nails on the edge of her clipboard and slows her pace as she nears the solitary padded cell. She peaks in the viewing window of the newest patient and shudders. She grips ahold of her pen and takes a deep breath. She knocks.

“Professor Crane?”

The words are all too familiar - her former mentor at college, and colleague, for a short time. Then the experiments had started and Jonathan Crane began to slip.

“Jonny ain’t here. Only Scarecrow now, darlin’," comes an eerie, lilting voice that sounded far too similar to Jonathan's for her liking.

“Scarecrow, then," she corrects herself, "May I come in?”

“You have the key.”

It was as much of an invitation as she was going to get.

Harley opens the cell door and eyes Jonathan’s figure in the corner of the room. She closes the door behind her and two security personnel stand watch outside. Jonathan’s head hangs low, his usually neat hair was flat and without product, and he was chained to his bed with what looked like something for dogs. Knowing Arkham, it very well might have been.

Scarecrow sees the sad look she gives the chain. “They’re afraid of me.”

She touches the pen to her lips in thought, “And, to you, that’s not a bad thing?”

“It’s glorious!” Scarecrow bellows.

“Can you tell me why?”

He laughs, “I can smell their fear. I want to manipulate it; find their weaknesses and break their tiny minds.”

Harley hums and scribbles notes down on to her patient evaluation form, “I can hardly imagine what you might gain from all this. I don’t believe you when you say it’s fun.”

“You poor girl. So incapable of seein’ that fear is what motivates us all. It’s so primal, so animalistic. And I control that.”

She resists the urge to smile to herself. There was nothing any man, including Scarecrow, liked more than mansplaining something to her. Even Eddie, despite all of his intellect, fell for the innocent dumb blonde trick. Or maybe he just liked talking.

“And you want this control because of what happened in your past?” She ventures.

A flicker of recognition crosses his face. Years of trauma and abuse at the hands of his great grandmother created The Scarecrow, but he would not admit to it, “There is no before! I am Scarecrow! I am fear itself. I exist only in the present!”

Harley gives him a sad look. It pained her to see him this way. Shaking from the cold, spouting nonsense, and thrashing about in the hope of intimidating her.

When she steps closer, he stops, almost in shock that she dared to do so.

“You want to be left alone, I can see that,” she says soothingly. She reaches out and touches the top of his hand.

Jonathan’s body jerks from the touch, but he doesn’t pull away. He looks up at her, his eyes swimming with confusion.

“Harley...?”

“Jonny?” Harley beams with excitement at breaking through to him.

“I...” Jonathan takes in his surroundings, “I’m in the...”

“For now,” she says quickly to stop him from feeling trapped, “You’re already making progress. You’ll be out of here soon, Professor.”

Jonathan stands from the bed and stretches out his aching muscles. The Arkham uniform made his skin itch and rubbed in awkward places, giving him a rash from the harsh material. The chain attached to his leg clinks as he shuffles along the floor.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Her voice breaks the silence between them.

Jonathan looks up at Harley as if he had forgotten she were there, “Uh, therapy. Edward’s. He... was pissed at Harvey over... turning his question mark graffiti in to two’s when we had that cell mix up.”

“Oh, Jonny,” she mumbles, “That was weeks ago.”

His eyebrow twitches with concern, but nothing else gives away the slight panic he was feeling at losing so much time. Jonathan was feeling fear at his own expense and he both loathed and took a strange pleasure in it.

“When will they let me out into the cafeteria?”

She shrugs, “If you stay calm like this... could be tomorrow. Provided you take your medication.”

Jon pushes his glasses up his nose and peers at Harley through them, “Hmm? I take it my treatment is psychotherapy accompanied by some description of an SSRI, perhaps carbamazepine for the aggression, and if I’m lucky an anti-depressant to stabilise my mood?”

Harley chews on her bottom lip, “I know this is weird for you. It is for me, too, Professor.”

Jon waves his hand dismissively, “I have no doubt I've taught you well. I trust your decisions as my doctor."

Harley beams despite herself at the genuine praise she was receiving.

"Go, child. I want some time to collect myself.”

And just like that Jonathan Crane was his usual stoic and emotionless self.

“I’ll be back tomorrow morning to do an assessment,” she says over her shoulder as she leaves.

Harley gives him another sad glance before exiting his cell and moving on to the next patient. She supposed that Arkham would get to her, too, in the end. 


	2. Chapter 2

Jon sleeps through his first night at Arkham in relative peace. He was far too exhausted from his time as Scarecrow to object as tiredness crept into his already aching joints and his mind neglected to give him any dreams – good or bad. Breakfast was at 7 a.m. and, by Harley’s request, Jon spends it in the cafeteria with the other inmates. He sits alone by choice, although no one had the nerve to approach him anyway. He stirs the measly portion of cereal in his bowl of milk with a plastic spoon and longs for his usual breakfast of a muffin and coffee. The orange juice that accompanied what Jon refused to call a ‘meal’ was out of date by a day, but he still guzzles it down. The guard in the corner keeps a particularly close eye on him, his hand glued to his baton. Jon does his best to ignore the angry glares from other inmates – they were mad that Jon hadn’t given them the release dates they wanted when he was practicing. Experimenting with fear toxin on some of their friends didn’t help, either.

He feels a heavy weight beside him and the cafeteria bench lets out a strained squeak. Waylon ‘Killer Croc’ Jones slurps the milk and cereal from his bowl by lifting it up to his mouth.

“Didn’t think I’d see ya in a place like dis, Jon-boy,” Waylon says.

Jon appreciates the genuine statement behind his words and gives a courteous nod.

“S’a real shame. Mind like yours,” Waylon continues, “Oh well, can’t get all caught up in the past, now, can we?”

“I suppose not.”

Waylon leans closer, “You gonna need a friend in a place like dis, Jon.”

Jonathan didn’t appreciate the invasion of his personal space. He puts up with it for the sake of not alienating Waylon and the help he may end up providing.

“Why do you say that?”

“Them boys ain’t happy ‘bout what you did when you wasn’t in a good place. Ol’ Waylon don’t take things too personally, y’see. Some people do. You’s smart, but not so good when it comes to fightin’.”

“Hmm. I see,” Jonathan casts a glance over his shoulder which turns into a glare as he spots Edward waving at him, “I would appreciate the protection, Waylon. Thank you.”

“Nah, s’no big thing for a friend,” he insists.

If he had the energy to smile at the other man, he would have.

“Waylon?” Jonathan takes the grunt that the other pushes out through his nose as a cue to continue. “Why is Edward trying so incessantly to gain my attention?”

Waylon laughs, “N’aw, Eddie jus’ like bein’ the centre of attention. He a cat.”

Jonathan examines Edward out of the corner of his eye. His behavior was not unlike what he’d encountered in their usual psychotherapy sessions. He was annoyingly chipper and seemed to be irritating everyone who had the misfortune of sitting by him. He spoke while also playing his own version of solitaire which used three packs of cards. A single pack was boring and had too few combinations and variations of cards. Edward had explained the rules extensively in their sessions to which Jonathan mastered the skill of sleeping with his eyes open.

“We gotta go back t’our cells soon. Lower-risk patients are comin’ out an’ we can’t be around ‘em,” Waylon says. He pats Jon on the shoulder as he leaves to throw his plastic cutlery and trash away.

“Let’s move,” yells the guard, pulling his baton from his hip, “Now!”

Jon joins the back of the line of bodies shuffling their way into the hallway and keeps his head down. Edward makes far-too-enthusiastic conversation with the guards to which no one responds, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Jesus Christ did that man enjoy the sound of his own voice.

Jonathan barely notices the baton waiting for him at chest height until he walks straight into it. He looks up in confusion. Not this asshole again. He’d been a mere pest when Jonathan was practicing, now it seems he may present a more immediate threat.

“You wait right there, freak,” Lyle Bolton orders.

“I ain’t done nothing wrong,” Jon says sternly, but calmly.

Bolton chuckles, “I got a special treatment for you today, Crane. Harley’s busy with some new admit. Makeup wearing freak, you would've liked him. Anyways, you're fair game without your student or your scale-y friend around to protect you.”

Jon grimaces but allows Bolton to push him down the hallway, the tip of the baton pressed into his spine at all times, into a small room where there were no security cameras. The guards always kept this room locked, even from practitioners. Now he knew why. He swallows in anticipation for the first strike. There was no secret between him and Bolton about what was going to happen next.

The strikes come hard and fast, the baton striking only in the places that the Arkham uniform would conceal. Jon bites the inside of his cheeks and denies Bolton any satisfaction he might have gained from his grunts of pain.

“You’re a fuckin’… brute for hire, Bolton,” Jon coughs, holding his throbbing ribs.

“ _Sir_. It was ‘Bolton’ when you worked here. Now you’re a fruitcake like the rest of them and you’ll give me the respect I deserve.”

Shove it up your ass, Jon thinks to himself. The wheezing of his lungs as he breathes gives away how much he was really hurting.

“I could leave you here and not a single person would care. No one would miss you,” Bolton taunts, “You’re nothing. I have a wife; a family. People to miss me. You’re a psycho who’s far too smart for his own good.”

“You shouldn’t have told _him_ that…” Jon pants.

Bolton frowns, “Who?”

Jon turns his head to look up at Bolton. The tiny flicker of fear, of doubt, of burning paranoia, aids Jonathan’s wide, silent smile.

Bolton gathers himself and breaks eye contact with Jon. He huffs and picks Jonathan up by the arm, practically dragging him back to his cell. Other guards turn a blind eye. How had this escaped his watchful eye? Jon supposed this was more common with the lower-risk inmates that Jon rarely treated. Still, it was a disgrace to the mental institution at the least.

Jonathan grunts in pain as he pulls the stiff blankets around his aching body. He didn’t wish to see the bruises that would form before the end of the day. He doesn’t sleep and he’s all the better for it. If he did, his dreams would have been filled with his great-grandmother – her punishments not unlike Bolton’s baton, but perhaps all the more psychologically crueler than the usual ‘you are worthless’ spiel. Jon’s suicidal thoughts could come up with something better than what Bolton had said to him. Though, to imagine Bolton saying anything more eloquent or personally upsetting was impossible considering the man’s ignorance and unintelligence.

However best he tries to ignore it, Jonathan cannot escape the image of Bolton seeing his so beloved family at the mercy of his fear toxin, nor can he escape the pleasure it brings him. A crow caws outside of Jonathan’s small window to the outside world and he smiles to himself.

His error had been choosing the wrong test subjects, of course! He needed to find subjects whose demise could be considered a gift to science and no great loss to society.

Lyle Bolton was that man.


End file.
